The hottest 20 music festival designs for millenials

It doesn’t seem to matter what genre it caters to – music festival design tends to triumph bright color, bold fonts and standout graphics. From logos to merch, mobile apps to billboard ads, it’s all about marketing to millenials.

These events are growing every year with more than 300 different large-scale music festivals around the world in the last year alone. In 2014, 1.34 billion dollars are projected to be spent on music venues and festivals in North America alone. That’s a serious chunk of change and festivals are working hard to ensure they’ve got their branding just right.

It’d be impossible to go through all of the different branding components for a festival in one post, so we’ll focus on how people first experience a festival’s identity — through their website. Here’s 20 websites that have harnessed their events’ unique personality to create cool, highly recognizable brands.

Austin City Limits‘ website takes the 1970s aesthetic from its boldly textual logo and expands it site-wide, using combinations of simple geometric shapes and colors reminiscent of the mod lifestyle to create a fun (if not a bit busy) brand.

The branding for Berlin Festival takes from an aesthetic the city is famous for – street art and collage. A simple color scheme of black, white and yellow that’s paired with a bold typeface selection gives this brand a bold impact without too much clutter.

Bestival‘s slightly pulsating illustration has got to be one of the most unusual takes of the bunch. Despite using the same neon and gem tone color palette shared by many of the designs here, it stands out with its quirky, hand-drawn presentation of information.

Compared to the overwhelming environmental design of the event itself, Coachella’s website is actually pretty understated. What makes this website special is how it changes based on the time of day. When we took this screenshot, it was nighttime and the site reflected that with darkness. If you check now (so long as it’s daytime in California), the sky will be a completely different shade. It’s an effective technique, because it makes us want to check back every hour just to see how the website has changed.

Given the wild reputation of North America’s biggest electronic dance festival, The Electric Daisy Carnival, we’re a bit surprised that their site is so corporate. It’s one page in the larger website of Insomniac, a tour promoter that advertises around 10 different festivals every year.

A lesser-known California festival, FYF (we’ll let you check out what that stands for on their website) focuses on organizing the incredible amounts of festival information that needs to be included – while also showcasing it in a distinctive and engaging way.

Our favorite feature is the grid of images listing out the lineup. It’s a great use of transparency, photography and typography.

Glastonbury is known around the world as the original music fest. Held in the muddy fields of England every summer, it’s boasted an infamous reputation for decades.

Their music festival design somehow makes bold color feel subdued, compared with the rest of these brands. Working in natural textures through both the imagery and typography, the look is softer without losing its edge.

In another just-not-quite-too-overwhelming design, The Governor’s Ball in New York pairs what is essentially a two-tone color scheme of salmon and blue with an intricate illustrated site structure. Like a couple of others in this collection, the site plays on graphics that you would see at the festival itself, pasting all of the information against the illustration of a metal billboard skeleton, with hip parallax scrolling to give more movement to the page.

Location: New York City, USAHeld in: JuneFirst year held: 20112014 Headliners: Outkast, Phoenix, TV on the Radio

White space doesn’t really seem to come into play much with the majority of websites on our list, the notable exception being Hove Festivalen. The contrast between the white background that the immense amount of color, textual and photographic imagery is a bit striking, and we’re not sure if it’s in a good way.

Lollapalooza’s site is a bit of an enigma in that it actually gets more interesting as you scroll down. The bottom of the page features a completely badass illustration, so probably you just want to head straight there and skip past all of the useful information on the way.

Lowlands Festival uses texture and the illusion of felt-tipped-marker transparency to give the site a hand-crafted feel. Not using perfect shapes or typefaces, but a simple and interactive home page, makes this a super fun brand to play around with. The only detractor is the ads on the front page — save those for the brochures!

Location: Biddinghuizen, NetherlandsHeld in: AugustFirst year held: 19932014 Headliners: Queens of the Stone Age, The National

Sharing the subdued color palette and paper-cut style illustrations, Outside Lands and Austin City Limits could be sister-sites. But it’s all about the vibrantly layers of shapes — both in text and imagery, that make this style of site work.

Paléo Festival gets our vote for most creative use of font, warping the text to imitate a malfunctioning TV set. The brand continues it’s unique aesthetic after the landing page with a blog style information page formatted in a jumbled grid structure to keep things interesting.

Eschewing the information-heavy format of some of its competitors, Pitchfork’s web page keeps it simple with thin lines and only the most necessary text in stark white against a brightly colored shifting gradient of a background.

Pukkelpop charmed us with its youthful use of color and simple geometric pattern, making us think back to our days in kindergarten playing with toy bricks and watching cartoons. The pattern does get a bit overwhelming at times with the amount of its use throughout the site, but heavier fonts and large chunks of solid color do what they can to balance everything out.

It’s impossible to resist a good comic-book play on branding! Soundwave finds a style unlike many other festivals, but then again has much less information to present given that the festival travels and details depend and the date and place.

Sometimes you have to put your best foot forward, and with Treasure Island Music Festival that best foot is probably location. As is demonstrated in the headliners listed in this article, many of the festivals in the circuit attract the same set of bands. So what makes Treasure Island sellable? It’s beautiful location on The Bay. And they use that, combined with fun typography, splashing it across the front page of their site.

Is it us, or are we seeing a bit of a trend with electronic festivals and design? Ultra is immediately distinguishable from most of the design in this collection, with the notable exception of EDC. Similar color palette as many of the above, but with less of a bohemian vibe, more of an industrial and commercial feel.

What you see is what you get with BPM’s minimal webpage design. Drawing from the area’s Mayan heritage and inspired by the colors of the night skies, this static page shrouds the festival in mystery. For now, the site has chosen to withhold the 350+ artists slated to perform in favor of teasing their dates, social media channels and tickets. It’s a brilliant way to build up excitement before making the Big announcement.

The author

Kaitlyn is part of the Community Team at 99designs.com. She grew up in Boulder, CO and went to school at Northwestern University in Chicago. When she's not blogging, she spends her time having adventures and being generally creative. She's all about having new experiences as often as possible!

Any comments?

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Alicia

Sep 12 2014

Hey Kaitlyn!

I see you’ve got a poll for the best music festival branding at the end of this article. I’m currently doing a research on a music festival as well, & am wondering if you’re able to share the poll results for my research?